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Posts Tagged: Lampeduza

An examination of the malware used in the Target breach suggests that the attackers may have had help from a poorly secured feature built into a widely-used IT management software product that was running on the retailer’s internal network.

As I noted in Jan. 15’s story — A First Look at the Target Intrusion, Malware — the attackers were able to infect Target’s point-of-sale registers with a malware strain that stole credit and debit card data. The intruders also set up a control server within Target’s internal network that served as a central repository for data hoovered up from all of the infected registers.

“ttcopscli3acs” is the name of the Windows share used by the POS malware planted at Target stores; the username that malware used to upload stolen card data was “Best1_user”; the password was “BackupU$r”

That analysis looked at a malware component used in Target breach that was uploaded to Symantec’s ThreatExpert scanning service on Dec. 18 but which was later deleted (a local PDF copy of it is here). The ThreatExpert writeup suggests that the malware was responsible for moving stolen data from the compromised cash registers to that shared central repository, which had the internal address of 10.116.240.31. The “ttcopscli3acs” bit is the Windows domain name used on Target’s network. The user account “Best1_user” and password “BackupU$r” were used to log in to the shared drive (indicated by the “S:” under the “Resource Type” heading in the image above.

That “Best1_user” account name seems an odd one for the attackers to have picked at random, but there is a better explanation: That username is the same one that gets installed with an IT management software suite called Performance Assurance for Microsoft Servers. This product, according to its maker — Houston, Texas base BMC Software — includes administrator-level user account called “Best1_user.”

This knowledge base article (PDF) published by BMC explains the Best1_user account is installed by the software to do routine tasks. That article states that while the Best1_user account is essentially a “system” or “administrator” level account on the host machine, customers shouldn’t concern themselves with this account because “it is not a member of any group (not even the ‘users’ group) and therefore can’t be used to login to the system.”

“The only privilege that the account is granted is the ability to run as a batch job,” the document states, indicating that it could be used to run programs if invoked from a command prompt. Here’s my favorite part:

“Perform Technical Support does not have the password to this account and this password has not be released by Perform Development. Knowing the password to the account should not be important as you cannot log into the machine using this account. The password is known internally and used internally by the Perform agent to assume the identity of the “Best1_user” account.”

I pinged BMC to find out if perhaps the password supplied in the Target malware (BackupU$r) is in fact the secret password for the Best1_user account. The company has so far remained silent on this question.

This was the hunch put forward by the Counter Threat Unit (CTU) of DellSecureWorks in an analysis that was privately released to some of the company’s clients this week.

“Attackers exfiltrate data by creating a mount point for a remote file share and copying the data stored by the memory-scraping component to that share,” the SecureWorks paper notes. “In the previous listing showing the data’s move to an internal server, 10.116.240.31 is the intermediate server selected by attackers, and CTU researchers believe the “ttcopscli3acs” string is the Windows domain name used on Target’s network. The Best1_user account appears to be associated with the Performance Assurance component of BMC Software’s Patrol product. According to BMC’s documentation, this account is normally restricted, but the attackers may have usurped control to facilitate lateral movement within the network.”

According to SecureWorks, one component of the malware installed itself as a service called “BladeLogic,” a service name no doubt designed to mimic another BMC product called BMC BladeLogic Automation Suite. BMC spokeswoman Ann Duhon said that the attackers were simply invoking BMC’s trademark to make the malicious program appear legitimate to the casual observer, but it seems likely that at least some BMC software was running inside of Target’s network, and that the attackers were well aware of it.

Update Jan. 30, 5:48 p.m.: BMC just issued the following statement:

There have been several articles in the press speculating about the Target breach. BMC Software has received no information from Target or the investigators regarding the breach. In some of those articles, BMC products were mentioned in two different ways.

The first was a mention of a “bladelogic.exe” reference in the attack. The executable name “bladelogic.exe” does not exist in any piece of legitimate BMC software. McAfee has issued a security advisory stating that: “The reference to “bladelogic” is a method of obfuscation. The malware does not compromise, or integrate with, any BMC products in any way.

The second reference was to a password that was possibly utilized as part of the attack, with the implication that it was a BMC password. BMC has confirmed that the password mentioned in the press is not a BMC-generated password.

At this point, there is nothing to suggest that BMC BladeLogic or BMC Performance Assurance has a security flaw or was compromised as part of this attack.

Malware is a problem for all IT environments. BMC asks all of our customers to be diligent in ensuring that their environments are secure and protected.

I parse their statement to mean that the “BackupU$r” password referenced in the Target malware is not their software’s secret password. But nothing in the statement seems to rule out the possibility that the attackers leveraged a domain user account installed by BMC software to help exfiltrate card data from Target’s network.

Original story:

According to a trusted source who uses mostly open-source data to keep tabs on the software and hardware used in various retail environments, BMC’s software is in use at many major retail and grocery chains across the country, including Kroger, Safeway, Home Depot, Sam’s Club and The Vons Companies, among many others.

A copy of the SecureWorks report is here (PDF). It contains some fairly detailed analysis of this and other portions of the malware used in the Target intrusion. What it states up front that it does not have — and what we still have not heard from Target — is how the attackers broke in to begin with….

The source code for “Carberp” — a botnet creation kit coded by a team of at least two dozen hackers who used it to relieve banks of an estimated $250 million — has been posted online for anyone to download. The code leak offers security experts a fascinating and somewhat rare glimpse into the malcoding economy, but many also worry that its publication will spawn new hybrid strains of sophisticated banking malware.

Carberp admin panel. Source: Xylibox.blogspot.com

The leak appears to have begun, as these things often do, with the sale of the source code in a semi-private cybercrime forum. On June 5, a member of the Lampeduza crime forum said he was selling the Carberp source to a single buyer, with a starting price of $25,000. The seller said he was helping out one of the developers of the code, who was short on cash.

By mid-June, links to download the entire Carberp archive were being posted on multiple forums, as first documented by Trusteer. Since then, experts from around the world have been tearing through the two-gigabyte archive to learn more about the code and its potential for future abuse in new and existing malware creations.

“Leaking the source code was not like the leaking of a weapon, but more like the leaking of a tank factory,” wrote one Ukrainian tech blogger on Livejournal.

According to Peter Kruse, a specialist with the Copenhagen-based CSIS Security Group, the package includes the Carberp bootkit; this is a component that can subvert the Patchguard protection in Windows 7 x86 and 64-bit systems so that the malware loads itself at the most basic levels of the system (Kruse said the bootkit component is incomplete and does not work against Windows 8 PCs).

Also included are components of a Trojan known as UrSnif, as well as an extremely popular and prevalent rival botnet creation kit called Citadel.

“As with the leakage of the ZeuS source code, back in May 2011, this means that criminals have every chance to modify and even add new features to the kit,” Kruse wrote, noting that the Carberp archive also contains several text files that appear to be records of private chats and various usernames and passwords.

CHEEKY CODERS

Last year, Russian and Ukrainian authorities arrested a loosely-affiliated group of hackers accused of programming and using Carberp to rob millions from bank accounts of their countrymen. According to an account of the law enforcement action in the Russian news outlet Kommersant, Carberp was coded by a team of about 20-25 people under the age of 30. Most of the men had never met face-to-face. Each worked remotely and was responsible for developing specific modules of the Carberp code, components that were then transmitted to a main development server in Odessa, Ukraine.

Some of the leaked Carberp source code archives.

Members of the coding forum kernelmode.info have been poring over comments left in the code by the Carberp developers. One set of comments, translated from Russian by a KrebsOnSecurity reader, suggests the developer was frustrated by having to program within the confines of what he considered sloppy operating system or perhaps Web browser plugin code.

“I will rip off someone’s hands for this kind of code!” the unidentified developer noted in one section of the Carberp source. “This stupid thing does God-knows-what.”